Jacques Brossard

Brossard, Jacques

Jacques Brossard, public servant, writer (b at Montréal 24 Apr 1933). He holds a BA (1952) from Collège Sainte-Marie, a L ès L (1955) from Université de Montréal and a social science degree (1957) from Oxford. Admitted to the bar (1956), he joined the foreign service in 1957.

He was assigned in turn to the economic affairs section of the Colombo Plan, the Atlantic Alliance, to Bogotá (Colombia) as the vice-consul and chargé d'affaires, and to Port-au-Prince (Haiti) as consul. He was then named director of Latin American Affairs and executive assistant to the minister of external affairs.

He left the civil service (1964) to become chief researcher at the Centre de recherche en droit public at Université de Montréal. In 1969 he became adviser to the Ministry of Intergovernmental Relations in Québec, having specialized in constitutional problems.

He published, in order: L'Immigration - les droits et les pouvoirs du Canada et du Québec (1967); Les Pouvoirs extérieurs du Québec (1967) in collaborationLa Cour suprème et la Constitution (1968), Prix du Québec, 1969; Le Territoire québécois (1970), in collaboration; and L'Accession à la souveraineté et le cas du Québec (2nd ed 1995).

He entered the field of literature with a collection of short stories, Le Métamorfaux (1974), which received critical attention, and a novel, Le Sang du souvenir (1976). In 1990, his novel Lés Années d'apprentissage, won the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association's Aurora Award for best French long-form work and the Prix de la Science fiction et du fantastique québécois; he also has twice won the Prix Boréal (1990 and 1994). He has also written for several periodicals. He won the Prix Duvernay (1976) for his work as a whole and the medal of the city of Paris (1977).